Roberto Serra Now, far be it from me to cry conspiracy, because we don't know the main reasons that pushed the Pentagon to promote this initiative. But until we have more precise answers on the matter, one of the most plausible hypotheses is a possible use of AI for surveillance purposes . But surveillance against whom? Well, for the moment it would seem that it is not towards US citizens, but towards foreign populations .
Yes, because the study was funded in particular within philippines phone data the Computational Cultural Understanding program , a DARPA initiative which, as stated on the agency's website, “ aims to create intercultural linguistic understanding technologies to improve situational awareness and the interactive effectiveness of DoD operators [editor's note: DoD stands for Department of Defense]”. This news raises several worrying considerations regarding the use of artificial intelligence and its application in the context of surveillance and the assessment of the 'guilt' of a human being starting from considerations born from what, in fact, is simple software, however evolved: privacy and surveillance .
The idea of AI being used to analyze people's texts for violations of social norms could pose a serious danger to freedom of expression and the right of each of us to maintain the privacy of our conversations; ambiguity of social norms . These rules vary greatly from culture to culture and even within the same society. Determining a single definition of 'violation' is impossible and leads inexorably to misinterpretations, especially if AIs are prey to prejudices linked to imperfect programming; Ethical issues related to the analysis of human emotions by an AI .